How we use cookies to decide what adverts to display on our websites

We show you ads on our digital platforms. Cookies help to make these ads relevant and interesting to you. If you do not allow cookies, you will still see ads; just less personalised to you.

Ads on our websites are served by a number of third party providers, including Double Click (Google) and other vendors who have signed up to the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework.

These providers will drop their own cookies on our websites which allows them to deliver ads and make ads more relevant to you (e.g. if you use our websites from outside the UK, you may get ads from your local country). Cookies are also used to monitor the performance and effectiveness of the ad served. Some of our providers may use other third parties to perform this monitoring function.

Double Click – https://adssettings.google.com/

Multiple vendors on the IAB Framework, including AppNexus, Open X, Index Exchange – http://advertisingconsent.eu/transparency-consent-framework-global-vendor-list/

Online behavioural advertising

We use behavioural advertising on our digital platforms. Online behavioural advertising (or interest based advertising) is a way of serving ads which are more relevant to you and your interests. We do this on the basis of our legitimate business and operational interest. This type of advertising uses cookies to discover general information about your web browsing history, including our websites you visit. It also looks at IP addresses to add general information about the country, city or region in which you are located, along with your domain name. This information allows you to be grouped with other people of similar interests and places you in a “market segment”.

We use third parties to provide these services including Permutive and Audience Project. These providers drop their own cookies to capture the information above and to create aggregated and anonymous profiles of who sees ads or who visits websites. These providers may also from time to time ask if you would like to participate in surveys on our websites, these are voluntary and can be opted out of at any time. As part of these surveys they may collect socio-demographic and interest information, which will only be used anonymously as part of a market segment. You will never be targeted specifically as an individual based on any responses.

We may then display ads which we believe people in your market segment will find relevant. We also share these anonymous segments with our advertising partners, so that they can deliver more relevant advertising on other websites. We believe this makes the advertising you see more interesting and relevant, and also helps us increase the value we get out of the website and from our advertisers. This ultimately gives us more to invest in great content on our digital platforms for the benefit of all our users.

Unless you have consented to receive targeted marketing communications in accordance with our Privacy Policy, we and our service providers will not attempt to identify you individually, and at no time do we know who you are or what pages you individually have been looking at – the relevant information is aggregated to create the market segments of groups of people.

Find out more information about our providers below:

Audience Project – https://www.userreport.com/general-invitation-privacy-policy/

Permutive – https://permutive.com/privacy/index.html

You can also find out more information about online behavioural advertising, and to choose other ad preferences here https://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/